To celebrate their birthday, and because we’re now confident that they’re ready for prime time, we’re making a few changes.

What’s Changing?

1. We’re removing “(Beta)” from the end of their name.

It’s like moving from a learner’s permit to real driver’s license.

2. We’re now using them on team and matchup pages.

Our new default power rating for team pages and matchup pages is the Predictive Rating from our New Ratings suite, so you’ll now see “Predictive Rank” where you used to see our old “Overall Rank”.

Unlike our previous Overall rankings, the new Predictive Rating is designed to be the best predictor of future games, so it relies heavily on margin of victory, and virtually ignores a team’s win-loss record.

No More “Lite” And “Pro” Packages

We now have a single premium package associated with each type of office pool we cover. In addition, we still offer an awesome bundle deal on our yearly Pool Picks Subscription, which includes access to all four of our pool picks products. You can see all our current office pool packages on our sales page.

Researching and improving our prediction models is an ongoing process, and one to which we devote significant time. The past year has been particularly active, though, as we’ve been rolling out significant pick logic updates to all of our sports. These updates are primarily designed to eliminate a long-standing source of user confusion, conflicting picks, but they should also help to improve our long term pick accuracy.

This week we launched a site update to enhance our NCAA Tournament 2013 section. A few weeks ago we introduced improved 2013 bracketology pages, and we’re now rolling out additional analytics to explore how we predict teams to do once the NCAA tournament begins. Remember that all of this new bracket predictions info updates daily, so check back frequently to see what’s changed.

A few days ago when we released our 2012 preseason college basketball top 25, we hinted that we had an exciting new feature that we were just itching to let loose into the wild. Well, here’s what we’re so amped about:

We are now simulating the entire college basketball season every single day, all the way from November through April. Our projections now include:

Last week we added a feature that’s been on our to-do list for a long time: box scores for all the sports we cover. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a small step toward exposing as much information as possible.

For the most part, these box scores should look similar to those you see on other major sport sites or in your daily newspaper. (Those still exist, right?) All the basics are there. However, we have added a few pieces of valuable info to each sport’s box score that you won’t be able to get from your typical ESPN report.

In our Monday update post about new college basketball stats and other assorted goodies, we mentioned that we’d be adding player stats for the past few seasons.

Well, our Compy 386 is finished running the numbers, and the stats from the last five years are now available for your perusal.

Our NCAA basketball player stat rankings now go back to the 2006-2007 season. Check out blocks per foul, for example. Make sure you check out the various splits that are available, like performance against Top 50 teams, or in away/neutral games. (Though unfortunately the ‘Last 2 Weeks’ and ‘Last 4 Weeks’ filters will only work once the season starts.)

Also, player pages now have career stats which should go back far enough to cover the full careers of all current players. Here’s preseason All-American Jordan Taylor modeling our new page. [Side Note: That is some seriously impressive improvement in all his shooting percentages from freshman to junior years. Dude must have lived at the practice court.]

The college basketball season starts in only three and a half weeks, which means it’s time to start preparing that section of the site for the upcoming year. We buy it some new back-to-school clothes, make sure it knows where all its classes are, and help it stock up on laundry detergent and quarters.

The first step this year was to add a few new team and player stats, and to make sure the improvements we’ve made to other sports are migrated over to the college basketball side. Here are some features we rolled out today.

Over 20 New College Basketball Team Stats

Some of these are probably familiar to you, but a few won’t be. The more unique stats are defined below:

It’s update time again! This week we have one big item and one small one.

The big one is something we’ve been developing over the summer — a new power ratings system. It’s not in a completely finished form yet, but it’s good enough that we thought we should let it see the light of day.

New Power Ratings

Our existing Predictive Power Ratings work great, but we’re always looking to improve our analytic tools, so we created what we believe is an even better rankings system that we hope will eventually replace our current one.

There are a few main differences between these and our regular ratings:

First, the New Rankings incorporate our preseason projections. For the first few games, the preseason ratings are a big factor, but as the season wears on, they will drop out entirely. This reduces the crazy ratings that you sometimes see in the first couple of weeks.

Second, these rankings are on a different scale: zero equals average, and the rating indicates how many points above or below average a team is. For example, a team with a Predictive Ranking of 10 is expected to beat an average team by 10 points at a neutral location. We think setting the average to zero makes the ratings easier to interpret.

Third, these new rankings should be more predictive than our current ratings. They performed better in our initial analysis, but before we take the big step of replacing our old ratings, we want to do more testing.

The Predictive Rankings are the centerpiece of this new set. These can be used to forecast the winner and score of future games. The rest of the new rankings are derive from these Predictive Rankings.

Most of them are simple splits. For example, the Away Rankings show performance in road game, and the In-Division Rankings rates a team based on how they’ve played against division foes. One of our favorite new splits is the Vs 1-5 Rankings — this shows how a team has fared when playing against the best teams in the league.

There is also a set of Strength Of Schedule rankings (SOS), which indicate how difficult the opponents of a team have been or will be. Beside the normal SOS rating that shows how difficult a team’s past opponents have been, we also have Future SOS, Full Season SOS, and a few other flavors.

Finally, there are two unique ratings. The Luck Rankings compare the number of actual wins a team has earned to the number of wins expected for a team with the same rating.

The Consistency Rankings are simply the standard deviations of the individual game ratings of each team. There, a lower value means a team has been more consistent.

NCAA Football Polls Comparison Page

Here, you can compare the AP Poll or Coaches Poll to our TR Predictive Rating, letting you see which teams are getting too much or too little respect. You can also see the biggest gainers and losers in the polls, and in our ratings.

It’s a quick one-stop shop to get an overview of the college football landscape.

So, please, take a spin through the new features — especially the new ratings — and let us know what you think. It’s your feedback that helps us improve existing tools and add new ones.

TeamRankings.com is not affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA®) or March Madness Athletic Association, neither of which has supplied, reviewed, approved or endorsed the material on this site. TeamRankings.com is solely responsible for this site but makes no guarantee about the accuracy or completeness of the information herein.